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Herrick's Wild Civility Martin Corless-Smith Boise State University

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Herrick's Wild Civility Martin Corless-Smith Boise State University Boise State University ScholarWorks English Faculty Publications and Presentations Department of English 11-1-2013 Herrick's Wild Civility Martin Corless-Smith Boise State University This document was originally published by Edinburgh University Press in Ben Jonson Journal. Copyright restrictions may apply. DOI: 10.3366/ bjj.2013.0085 2 MODERN POETS ON SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POETS MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH Herrick's Wild Civility When one reaches for a book to take on a trip there might be any number of reasons for making a choice, but undoubtedly pre­ eminent for me is company. I find that more often than not I take Herrick. And I have wondered why this is. Part of the reason is that he is at once familiar, and so I bring the familiar with me as one might a friend, but he remains somewhat enigmatic. I have been reading his Hesperid.s for longer than I care to recall, and it is not as if I haven't finished reading it so much as it seems never to have finished. Part of this is the haphazard way I read, but a lot must be laid at the feet of Herrick and his idiosyncratic book, which meanders and restarts,' and even seems to end a good many times before it runs out of poems. Titles appear and reappear, he famously bids a solemn "farewell to sack"2 and perhaps less famously welcomes it back thirty pages later without a hint of contradiction. He acknowledges the great (clearly in a civil war era his dedications to the King are a political statement) as well as the unknown, tl,e historical alongside the fictional. His works wander The Bell Jonson Journal 20.2 (2013): 273-282 DOl: 10.3366/bjj.2013.0085 © Edinburgh Uruversity Press www.euppublishing.com/bjj 2i4 BEN JONSON JOURNAL from bawdy Anacreontics to scurrilous Martialian epigrams to Tlu lW<lrthrcaking Jonsonian elegies. It is the most inclusive of books, Hesp and the most unruly. It is delightfully disordered, and as such it TheE remains (lndlessly expansive, ever open, always new. In short it is wedc gn'at company. as to Herrick is well known today as a minor poet, a cavalier poet, Joean on(' of the self-eleded "sons of Ben," though now he is perhaps as of til often read as his master Ben Jonson, and certainly as anthologized. goinl His standing is secure, though not perhaps significant compared migr to his abilities. Swinburne considered him lithe greatest song­ west writer-as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist-ever Hurr born of English race,'" though he suffers now perhaps due to Hesp the influential opinions of F. R. Leavis ("trivially charming"4) and The T. S. Eliot who saw the "inspired frivolity" in parts but found thet the whole to contain "no ... continuous conscious purposell and a di' no "unity of underlying pattern,"5 and conferred upon him the creal title of minor poet in comparison to Herbert whom he saw as EI great. Neither Leavis nor Eliot were fools, but both obviously coil, read with agendas significantly other than Swinburne's. And both of I have had more critical influence than the eccentric Victorian or the other suppOl"ters of Herrick. If one considers the phenomenon of is e: the canon, with the nomenclature and pomp of canonization that nosl takes place, it does seem that the lyrics of Herrick might suffer whi in comparison to the grand bombast of a Milton, Or even the taut sola personal struggles of Donne' (or the brilliant deconstructive wit of imf Marvell). The twentieth cenhlry may have started as a haven for /Ide Herrick's undoubted charms, but it did not end as one.' His style the is willfully inconsistent, his silliness is unforgiveable, his dances alOl and frills, even his playful seductions seem hopelessly naive and lug out of keeping with modern life, as outdated as the festivals and tasl countryside idylls he describes. But perhaps it was always so. And sirr Herrick is not as frivolous in his lyricism as it might appear. He is wh crafty, that is, he is an exquisite craftsman, something that the son of be) a goldsmith, and a trained goldsmith himself, would have seen as his the highest compliment, but he is also crafty. His message is subtle, El) as subtle as it needed to be in a time of great political unrest. And his his task in creating the most simple of lyrics is to continue a craft ml that he sees as being as vital to culture and country as it is to soul and man. P" COl Herrick's Wild Civility 275 The title Hesperides refers to both the nymph daughters of Hesperus (the evening star Venus) and the garden they protect. The garden is the orchard of Hera, where the nymphs protect her wedding gift from Gaia, a tree bearing golden apples. Speculati,m, as to the whereabouts of the garden vary, though it seems the location is often "to the west," giving the position the poignancy of the setting sun (think of the end of the Monarchy as the Slln going down). The garden brings echoes of Eden and Elysium, and might also reflect Herrick's own status as an "exiled Ovid" in the west county of Devon. The rest of the title, "or THE WORKS both Humane and Divine" purports to offer a translation, so that we see Hesperides as a collection of the poetical fruits of Herrick's labours. The title conflates the work with the guarding of that work, seeing the task of poetry as both making the work and jealously guarding a divine gift. It's important to remember that Herrick is both the creator and the custodian. Entitling the book "the Works" also hints at a posthumous collection,8 further endorsed by the frontispiece portrait, an etching of Herrick as a funeral bust. 111e message is that herein lies the worthy remains of our autl10r, his best part. This reading is endorsed by an epigram of Ovid "Effugient avidos C.rmina nostra Rogos" ("our songs will escape the greedy funeral pyres"), which is actually a very obvious misquote: Ovid's original using sola instead of nostra (most Early Modern editions used the imperfect "effugien!," will, rather than the modem preference for "defugient," do) in his elegy for Tlbullus, where his implication is the subtly different "Defugient avidos carmin. sola rogos"9 ("song alone escapes the greedy funeral pyre"). Herrick's inclusivity highlights the communality of the poetic garden, seeing his own task as guardian as well as practitioner. The songs are "ours" not Simply "his." He allies himself with Ovid, and thus with llbullus, which alongSide the funeral bust, show his poems stretching beyond his mortal span, reaching backwards and forwards in history. TIlls suggests Hesperides is an atemporal realm, a poetic Elysium or garden where Herrick and Ovid and Tibullus (as well as his beloved Jonson) can meet to drink heady inspiration from the muse's cup. Herrick's modesty (compared to Jonson's virile self­ promotion, or Milton's self-appointed grandeur) is nonetheless a conscious self-election to the pantheon. 276 BEN JONSON JOURNAL So let's look at one of his most popular lyrics, here in full: reappears iJ furough "ca furough the A SWEET disorder in the dress rhymes artf, Kindles in clothes a wantonness: (10th the ce A lawn about the shoulders thrown the110ntl off Into a fine distraction: ~glye An erring lace which here and there ~atonce di Enthrals the crimson stomacher: ~ch. And a A cuff neglectful, and thereby reframing oj Ribbons to flow confusedly': A winning wave (deserving note) In the tempestuous petticoat: A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility : Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part10 Delight is a pretty 14 line sonnet of rhyming couplets in regular iambic quadnuneter, with each line a complete clause. The meter offers only one "distraction," which must be pulled out of its usual three syllables, iI dis-trac-tion," into an unusual four" dls-tract-i-on" instead-something of a playful tugging of the word that might prepare us for the erring lace to follow. As is typical of Herrick there is plenty of alliteration (disorder, dress; kindles, doll,es; IIoth poems winning wave) and a great deal of consonance and assonance ("A alo.er migl lawn about the shoulders tluown"), with the syllable "in" playing ~artll in Jon: a strong role in holding the whole piece together sonically and woman too visually. Until the final "Do," each couplet begins with either the 'grace" as , article "a" or "an," with four of the following lines beginning with small detail: an "in" or Hen" sound, and the other lines at least echoing the IT' lre,lise on I sound. Until the final rhyme of "art" and "part" Herrick rhymes counter inttr a single-syllable word with a three-syllable word (or in one case deceptively "thereby" with "confusedly": a two-syllable word with a four). They are, in This has a ravishing effect, producing a sense of effortless flourish while embo at the end of earn couplet, almost as if we see the modest single neglect" is n syllable unfurl into extravagance: U dress" becomes "wantonness." Ielue to a sl Throughout, the idea of the ribbon or the lace unraveling becomes In his trea the play of the syllables, the "es" of "dress" and "wantonness" oreslraine< Herrick's Wild Civility 277 reappears in "deserving" and weaves into "tempestuous,'1 and through "careless" where the lies" becomes liS" and continues through the "shoe~string/, "see" and ('civility.1f Every IIpare( rhymes artfully, "ribbon" finds kinship in proximity to "winning" (with the central doubling of consonants), and "enthralls," where the "on" off rhymes with the "en".
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